Cloud ONTAP

  We’ve all seen the cloud coming for years, but now suddenly our clients are finding hyperscalers compelling and maybe essential.  We encourage our clients to use the public cloud wherever it’s optimal and we’d love to partner with customers as they make the transition.  One of the ways we can help is with Cloud ONTAP.

  Retaining the security, standards, and integrity of your data as you start to use the cloud isn't easy.  If your data is already on NetApp, it's a cinch to deploy NetApp's OS in the cloud and replicate the data over, solving all those problems. 

Cloud ONTAP is purchasable in two forms:

• Pay as you go – By directly from AWS and pay per hour.
• Bring Your Own License: 6 or 12 month “everything included” license quoted by NetApp.
• I heard NetApp can put together a 48 month license quote if needed.
• Includes up to 368TB of capacity.
• Neither of these options include the cost of AWS, which depends on several factors, including:
• Which instance size you choose (M4.4KL, M4.2XL, M3.XL, M3.2XL, R3.XL, R3.2XL, etc).  This is a menu of RAM/CPU combos.*
• If you’re using NetApp aggr encryption, you can only choose M4.2XL
• What type of disk you chose (SSD or HDD).
• How much capacity you need.
• How utilized you expect the CPU to be.
• How much data you expect to be transferred out of the instance.  Transfer into AWS is free.

You can use the AWS cost calculator to estimate the cost: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

*Testing indicates a M3.2XL instance caps out at ~10k IOPS (100% read) and 1.5k IOPS (100% write) at 20ms latency.  M4.4XL should accomplish roughly 2x the performance of M3.2XL.  

  In most situations, using storage in the cloud is going to cost you 3+ times the acquisition cost of the same on-prem storage array over a 4 year life.  After accounting for datacenter costs and hardware management though, you may find the TCO comparable.  NetApp offers a free cloud workshop to help you identify which workloads are great cloud candidates to help you sort through your real requirements and costs.  Feel free to reach out to your friendly neighborhood netapp engineer or myself if you're interested!

All technical information is as of CDOT 8.3.2, CDOT 8.4 is expected to have big improvement for Cloud ONTAP.